Hi all

[Zamboni]

Hello all... I can't believe that I found a EOC forum that is still alive! (Well sort of)

EOC is my favourite space combat game of all time...

[sauron1]

Much more alive than it may appear - the moderator accidentally deleted thousands of posts last Friday night. :rolleyes:

Anyhow, welcome to the forum. :)

[GrandpaTrout]

Welcome aboard!

It is so cool to still be getting new people (and some for Iwar) all these years after release. I guess that is how you define classic.

So Zamboni, what was your favorite part of EoC?

And my other favorite question: What image/sound sticks in your mind. Where did you just stop playing and sit and watch a bit?

[Majiir]

...and most importantly, what was your favorite SHIP? :D

welcome to the boards. it's so nice to know there are people out there who actually played any of the i-war games. :up:

[SchnozBott]

Welcome to the best forum ever! :D

Good to know there are still space sim fans left to find

[MarauderD]

The new guy brings up a good question - if Atari ever decides that EoC was too long ago... do we have an evacuation plan, or do we all run away in our separate directions?

[Hot4Darmat]

Good question. With the recent mishap, it seems more possible then ever that it might just be decided to end all support for ancient titles to make room for new ones (even though, as Major Tom has pointed out, we're barely a scratch on the surface of resources).

Anyway, my escape route has always been Soup's excellent site. The forums there are still, and have always been quite active. That, and a growing list of email addresses for more direct 1 to 1 contacts have kept me in the I-war loop.

Still, another forum would be great. MT's multiplayer site has been revamped and might be a good candidate if forums there work OK (haven't tried it yet as I'm still on f***ing dialup). Dready's site's still there. Cormorant still has an active site as well, but I don't think there is any forum set up. I think it's time for nano to bring back Colliderring.com, too.

[sauron1]

Hotfoot also has a site - www.realmofconfusion.com. It's good.

[Zamboni]

Actually I played EoC a long time ago (soon after its release)... I just recently acquired a copy (I was playing a pirated copy b4... do you know how hard it is to actually FIND a copy of EoC? In Canada?) and decided to play it again...

Anyhow, I used to post in the GameFAQ forum for EoC, but that board died faster than a tug in a mine field... I only found this site when I was searching for mods.

Now to answer your questions:
- The image that drawn me to EoC most would be flying past stars... You get to see a blinking twinkle expand into a flaming ball as you fly past...

- My favourite ship would be the adv. patcom I guess... (I don't have any mods that add ships)

Now some questions of my own... Why does the LDS drive fly at some 30 times the speed of light contrary to what the manual says? Oh and why do planets spin at a visible rate? I once sat in front of a planet and watch it rotate a full revolution in some 10 minutes (yes I'm that bored...) which means a day's gone by in that amount of time for the residences on that planet... (ah so that's why Jefs' boasting he once went on a sex marathon for 2 days) :)

On a last note, I've a technical question about the game: I'm experiencing some sound problems with the LDS drive. Instead the usual rumbling noise when I activate LDS it is a sort of shrieking noise as if the engines are about to explode... All other aspects of the game audio seems fine. I've tried turning down HW acceleration as suggested, and I have the latest driver (for everything)... Just wondering if anyone else have this problem and how to fix it... (My sound card is a SB Live! 5.1)

[Majiir]

I can't answer your sound question, but I seem to remember the subject of time coming up a couple of years ago after IW2's release.

In the original game, the LDS drive was exactly as advertised, operating at a maxiumum of just under the speed of light. To compensate for the fact that at those speeds it would take you over 20 minutes to get from Earth to Mars, time compression was added so it would only take you, say, 3 minutes to make the same trip. With the simplification of IW2's interface and user visible physics engine, I think you could say the time compression is theoretically still present, it's just no longer made apparent.

"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." ~ Ford Prefect

[Nightwatch]

Even with that, I thing I remember reading a post for the LDS speed to be speeded up or adding a time compression cause it was taking too long! Some people.. :)

Anyway, I think for me it was the sheer joy of selecting a destination hitting a few buttons and watching the screen. I found the pice of travilling petween places very theraputic and relaxing (except for when I started getting interupted by annoying distress signals...), and served as a nice "frame" for the fight parts.

And of course the times your autopilot screwed up and routed you though a planets atmosphere were always nice for making you feel all warm and safe..

[SchnozBott]

I've had that SBLive bug too, after updating my drivers. When I revert back to the included WinXP WDM driver, EoC's sound behaves normally.

Something about the reference driver causes the repeating sounds to play back at too fast a rate, sped up by a multiple of something.

Unless it would cause more problems than it fixes, you could try switching to the WDM driver by rolling back, or picking it from the list manually.

[Zamboni]

Yup it does fix the sound problem... Though now I can't control any multi-speaker options... (ie. Audio HQ won't work)... At least I still have sound coming out all the speakers.

Thanx for the fix though.

[SchnozBott]

Yeah that's the thing, the WDM driver isn't compatible with any of the SBLive applications that help control it, but the OS still has some controllable options that are good enough.

[Stephen Robertson]

I've found the SBLive drivers tend to be a bit dodgy compared to the standard Windows WDM drivers.

As you say, you don't get all the fancy options but I prefer sound that actually works!

[SchnozBott]

I still gotta toggle to the reference driver to play Tron 2.0 though, otherwise that game skips dialog lines on the WDM driver :rolleyes: